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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28227105">Earth and sky were very close</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse'>lotesse</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Backstory, Character Study, Family Feels, Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, La Llorona, Leaving Home, Mythology References, Texas, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:53:33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,087</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28227105</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Even in the North, where Hester fits in like a native creature, Lee keeps wearing his Texan skin, the drawl of his voice and turn of his accent, the flair in his fashion and the way he holsters his gun. The Country of Texas is a part of him, the way he can see Lyra’s Oxford is for her; a familiar land, friendly-seeming, but often strange and threatening too, in ways that could take a person off-guard.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lyra Belacqua &amp; Lee Scoresby</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>56</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Earth and sky were very close</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopefulNebula/gifts">HopefulNebula</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Happy yuletide, hopefulnebula!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The earth and the sky were very close<br/>When the sun rose it rose in his heart.</p>
<p>~William Carlos Williams</p>
<p> </p>
<p>When Lee had been a little boy, he’d always listened to the tias and abuelas – at least when they were telling stories. Other times, maybe a little more hit or miss. He’d dreamed for many nights of La Llorona, the weeping woman, after Tia Melinda had told him the ghostly tale. But in his dreams, it had been his own mother who had been doomed to forever wander the riverbank looking for her lost child, always hearing the crying of its runaway coyote demon, even though when Lee woke he remembered well enough that it was his mother that they’d lost to the earth.</p>
<p>Many such things had seemed possible, for a young fellow growing up in the Country of Texas. It wasn’t that the Magisterium wasn’t there; only, that other things still were, too. Folktales and the remnants of ancient rituals honoring serpent gods, creator goddesses, turned to other stuff than earth as they were remembered in the oral tradition honored by the Tejanos, spreading out on both sides of the river as inevitably as the scrub grass.</p>
<p>Lee’s mother, rest her soul, had succumbed to the diptheria when he’d still been very young. Lee only remembered her as a haze of soft feelings and warm smells, his sweet small-bodied mama, all bread and milk and salt and tobacco from the burnt offerings she left for the ancestors, her barnswallow daemon a blur of dipping and weaving around her, always in motion, before the final moment when he was gone, and her body was left behind, so, so still, frozen as a photogram in his memory.</p>
<p>The first aeronauts Lee had known of were the carnival folk, motley crews of men and women who lived on the road and enjoyed a certain degree of freedom by sacrificing the stability that they would have needed to attain a more respectable status. Back when him and Hester had thought she was no more than just a plain jackrabbit, it had seemed an impossibility that they should ever walk that lonely path. But, here they are; and in the air they mean to remain.</p>
<p>Lee doesn’t go back to Texas much anymore, hasn’t done since he got big enough to pose a return threat to his old man. Not even to lie flowers at his mama’s grave does he go back there. Anymore, he’s not sure if it’s that he won’t go back, or that he can’t. Wanted for too many things, in too many ways, but never for himself. So, off he’d gone, and off he’s stayed.</p>
<p>Perhaps that’s why he’d never had a child of his own body, though he’d always been friendly with kids and an easy hand with babies. You have to belong somewhere, to have a child of your own. Better to shine and twinkle for the straying lambs Lee found along his way, get them back to their homes or on to safer pastures, if he meant to stay light on his feet, always half in-the-air.</p>
<p>His girl, his Lyra, his firecracker, his wild bird. In her he saw the same acceptance of overlapping mythologies that he’d attained in his childhood, although how she’d managed to come to such a broad character of mind in Oxford he couldn’t rightly tell. Seemed to Lee that they were all rules and dust, those dreaming towers she came from. But at least they’d gotten her head up into the clouds, where it was clear she rightly belonged.</p>
<p>He hasn’t left Texas behind him completely. Even in the North, where Hester fits in like a native creature, Lee keeps wearing his Texan skin, his background turning up in the drawl of his voice and turn of his accent, the flair in his fashion and the way he holsters his gun. The Country of Texas is a part of him, the way he can see Lyra’s Oxford is to her; a familiar land, friendly-seeming, but often strange and threatening too, in ways that could take a person off-guard if they weren’t careful.</p>
<p>And maybe it’s those boyhood memories of La Llorona, grieving forevermore for her lost child, her terrible mistake, her failure of love to give good, needed care, maybe that’s what drives Lee when it comes to the trouble in the North, where the Magisterium has been hiding away their most terrible deeds. Children split away from their souls, left to languish alone in little cold cages. That gets to Lee, and would even if he hadn’t sworn his heart to Lyra’s cause about two minutes after he’d first met her.</p>
<p>In Lyra – she used the name Silvertongue, now, not Belaqua, but mostly Lee thought of her as just Lyra, his Lyra, a perfect name for his perfect little feral darling of a sweet-spirited liar, who made him wax internally poetic in the most foolish of ways – in Lyra, Lee had come pretty quickly to understand that he’d found a home in at least one sense; insofar as he now had a love bigger than himself, a cause and a future for which it would be worth laying down even his very life. </p>
<p>He had no need, any more, to answer the old, nagging internal question that was always tugging at a man’s heart, always asking him: “where did you come from, where are you going?” Not anymore, because the first part didn’t matter in the run of things, when he was most often up in the balloon, in-between-places, Texas and the Arctic all at once, and from now on, the answer to the second question was always gonna be her. </p>
<p>It gave a man comfort, even in the face of the grave, to know where his heart belonged, and that the child he loved as his own had a fighting chance to live. Maybe she would achieve escape velocity and at last fall away from the curve of the earth, and fly free into a better world than his had been, and thrive. </p>
<p>If he could manage that for her – that would be enough. That would suffice. If he could only give her that freedom, keep his Lyra intact to grow up whole, he could rest sure that his soul would be spared from that boyhood bad dream of endless, lonely penance and weeping on that far, unearthly riverbank that he could sometimes glimpse at the farthest horizons of the sky when the sun dipped low.</p>
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